blue wall

see rust belt

NO MERRI

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11/18 3 flipped?

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AN 6 26

Since 2016, when Donald Trump shattered the Democrats’ blue wall by winning working-class voters across the Midwest, a cottage industry has sprung up on the left dedicated to answering a single question: How can Democrats win back the working class?

The answers come in different forms. Sometimes it is veteran Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders – barnstorming red districts, railing against oligarchy and corporate greed.

Or it’s Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, who after the 2024 election declared, “Democrats must reclaim our identity as the party of the working class.”

Or the answer comes from a new generation of candidates – tattooed veterans, mechanics, bartenders – whose biography is supposed to do the political work that policy has not.

Graham Platner, the Maine Senate candidate who has become the left’s latest blue-collar savior, put the theory in its most unguarded form.

“We are in a form of class war,” he says. “And if the Democratic Party is going to have a future with working people, it needs to pick the side of working people.”

How does he define the working class? “Essentially everybody who isn’t making all their money on an immense amount of wealth.”

The theory is all the same: Somewhere out there is a latent working-class majority, held together by shared economic grievances, waiting to be politically reassembled to vote for Democrats. The New Deal did it – Democrats can do it again.

I’m a political scientist who has written extensively about rural and working-class communities. I believe it is an open question whether these reformist Democrats are really interested in understanding working-class voters on their own terms. Because working-class voters, as they tell us themselves, are not simply waiting to be activated by the right program, the right messenger, the right phrase. “Fight the oligarchy” probably isn’t going to do it.

Working-class voters have a worldview. For 50 years, it has been growing less compatible with the Democratic Party’s – not because working-class voters changed, but because Democrats did.

Working-class identity

Since the early 1950s, the American National Election Studies has asked respondents whether they think of themselves as members of the working class. This article uses my analysis of that data.

While a larger proportion of the electorate has obtained a college degree and household incomes have risen, the share of Americans who consider themselves working class has remained remarkably stable: roughly 35% of voters for the past 70 years, 38% in 2024.

Working-class identity is something more durable and culturally grounded than a description of who isn’t a billionaire. It is a specific way of looking at the world.

There are conventional ways to define the working class, but they often miss how people understand their own place in society. In the 2024 American National Election Studies, for example, 21% of those who identify as working class have a college degree, only 5% belong to a private-sector union, and 37% own stocks. Conversely, most Americans without a college degree do not identify as working class.

Working-class voters have never been a predominantly Democratic group – not even at the height of the New Deal coalition. Based on the American National Election Studies self-report measure, the working-class share of the Democratic coalition peaked around 56% in 1960 and has fallen more or less continuously since, sitting at just about 30% today.

Meanwhile, the share of working-class voters who identify as Democrats has been declining for half a century: A majority did so in 1958, but not since.

Working-class voters have not become Republicans. Only in 2020 and 2024 – the first time in the survey’s history – did more working-class voters identify as Republican than Democrat, and even then by narrow margins.

The data shows a working class that is politically homeless: estranged from the Democrats, not captured by the Republicans, stuck in the middle with diminishing attachment to either party.

IFrame Content

Economic abandonment

So what drove them out?

A segment of the progressive left has a ready answer: Democrats abandoned working-class voters economically – on trade, wages and industrial policy. Working-class voters responded rationally. Fix the economics and the coalition comes back.

Trade is where the argument is strongest. In 1988, roughly 74% of both Democrats and working-class voters groups favored limits on imports to protect American jobs.

By 2024, only 26% of Democrats favored limits, while a majority – 54% – of working-class voters continued to do so.

Unlike most Democrats, many working-class communities do not see globalization in their interest. Running alongside the trade gap is a widening divide over values that no tariffs can fix.

What fairness requires

In 1984, Democrats and working-class voters broadly agreed that treating people more equally would mean fewer social problems. A divergence opened after 2008 and accelerated after 2016, with Democrats now 28 points more likely than working-class voters to think we should worry more about equality.

In 1986, half of mainstream Democrats and a slightly smaller percentage of working-class voters agreed with the idea that Black Americans don’t succeed because they don’t try hard enough. By 2024, Democratic agreement had collapsed to 13%. Working-class voters declined too, but to 32%.

The gap that opened between them is not primarily a story about rising working-class racial resentment. It is a story about the Democratic Party’s rapid post-2008 shift toward a worldview that places far greater explanatory weight on structural barriers and far less on individual effort and personal responsibility.

Working-class voters, who historically have understood their own lives through a framework of hard work and earned reward, did not shift so dramatically.

Alignment becomes division

On cultural questions, the pattern persists: Working-class voters did not move right in reactionary revolt. Democrats moved left.

In 1986, similar levels of Democrats and working-class voters agreed with the statement “This country would have many fewer problems if there were more emphasis on traditional family ties.” By 2024 a 25-point gap emerged.

On whether religion is an important part of their life: a near-zero gap through the early 1990s, but 17 points by 2024. On abortion, a 3-point gap in 1980 became 30 points in 2024. Regarding whether immigration levels should be increased, the two groups were virtually identical in 2000 – around 8% support – but by 2020 Democrats were at 48%, working-class voters at 24%.

But even where working-class voters nominally agree with a Democratic policy goal, they don’t trust the institution being asked to deliver it – a distrust decades in the making.

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How the ‘system’ plays

In 1958, working-class voters and Democrats were within 5 points of each other on whether government wastes a lot of tax money. By 2024 that gap reached 27 points – not because working-class voters lurched toward anti-government extremism, but because mainstream Democrats became dramatically more trusting of government as an instrument of social change.

Working-class voters are 17 points more likely than Democrats to say people like them have no say in what government does. In 2024, 88% of working-class voters and 75% of Democrats said government is run by a few big interests. Both groups agree the system is captured.

Yet the Democratic policy response, invariably, is to expand the system.

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On support for expanding government – from healthcare to jobs to environmental programs – Democrats and working-class voters have diverged dramatically since the 1980s. By 2024, there were approval gaps of between 20 and 30 points on providing government health insurance, environmental spending and a guaranteed jobs program.

On every major plank of the progressive economic agenda, Democrats are now substantially to the left of the workers they claim to champion.

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Not all class war

Working-class voters have been telling pollsters for 60 years that the political system doesn’t hear them. Democrats, over the same period, have grown more comfortable with the institutions working-class voters have increasingly less faith in.

This distrust is the accumulated residue of specific experiences: deindustrialization that happened on government’s watch, trade deals that economists endorsed and workers paid for, a 2008 financial crisis response that saved the banks and foreclosed on their homes, an opioid epidemic that regulators missed entirely.

To be fair, this is precisely what the new crop of reform candidates say they want to fix. The argument that the right candidate can move the needle is not crazy. Candidate quality matters. Personal trust can substitute for institutional trust, at least at the margins.

But economic grievance politics is a very small slice of what working-class voters are telling us. The data documents a comprehensive, decades-long divergence in how working-class voters and mainstream Democrats understand fairness, government, personal responsibility and social change.

Reducing that to class war jams working-class voters into a prefabricated progressive agenda rather than taking seriously what they are actually saying.

Nicholas Jacobs, Goldfarb Family Distinguished Chair in American Government, Colby College; Institute for Humane Studies

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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mike davis jacobin

...

The Mythic Blue Wall

Looking ahead to future presidential elections, the Trump strategy points to a red wall that could be bigger and more beautiful than the Democrat’s blue one.

Clinton’s “blue firewall” cracked in Minnesota; was narrowly breached in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania; and totally collapsed in Ohio (and Iowa, if we consider it a Democrat-leaning state.) Whole swathes of 2012 Obama counties in northwestern Illinois, eastern Iowa, western Wisconsin and Minnesota, and northern Ohio and New York were won by Trump.

The “margin shift” — winning or losing percentage of Clinton 2016 versus Obama 2012 — was over 15 points in West Virginia, Iowa, and North Dakota; 9 to 14 points in Maine, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Hawaii, Missouri, Michigan, and Vermont. In southern Wisconsin’s former auto belt (Kenosha and Rock counties), where Obama had crushed Romney by huge margins in 2012, the Democratic vote was down 20 percent and the former UAW stronghold of Kenosha went for Trump.

Even in New York Clinton finished 7 points behind Obama, thanks to a massive Republican vote in eastern Long Island (Suffolk County) and poor support from blue-collar Democrats in older industrial districts upstate. According to exit polls, she won 51 percent of union households, a poor showing compared to the 60 percent of Obama in 2008 and 2012. Trump beat the union vote of the previous three Republican candidates and in Ohio won a flat-out majority.

This pattern is particularly ironic since Democrats in many of these areas had cast outsized votes for her during the 2008 primaries. Indeed this had been presumed to be Clinton country. “How could they lose Michigan with 10,000 votes!” groused veteran pollster Stanley Greenberg, a key architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 victory, when he saw the final figures.

But one overriding fact determined the outcome: the Republicans have had an aggressive strategy for winning dominance in the Rust Belt, supported by an impressive infrastructure of state-level think tanks, regional billionaire donors, and wizard gerrymanderers from the Republican State Leadership Committee. In contrast, the Democrats, especially those in the industrial but non-metropolitan counties so common throughout the upper Midwest, have been left to swing in the wind by a national party that (the 2009 General Motors and Chrysler rescues aside) offers no remedies to further decline and communal pauperization.

As readers of David Daley’s bestselling Ratf**kedknow, Rove and his conservative quants responded to the meltdown of Republican power in 2008 with an audacious scheme for retaking power in Washington through control of decennial redistricting. The Midwest was the bullseye. “There are 18 state legislatures,” Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal,

that have four or fewer seats separating the two parties that are important for redistricting. Seven of these are controlled by Republicans and the other 11 are controlled by Democrats, including the lower houses in Ohio, Wisconsin, Indiana and Pennsylvania. Republican strategists are focused on 107 seats in 16 states. Winning these seats would give them control of drawing district lines for nearly 190 congressional seats.

In the event, as Daley shows, chump change (about $30 million) spent on targeted state races in 2010 produced a revolution in party power with the Republicans winning nearly seven hundred seats and control of key legislatures in Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan as well as Florida and North Carolina. Computer-generated redistricting punctually produced a dream map that made Republican control of the House virtually invulnerable until the 2020 census, despite the demographic forces favoring Democrats.

The piece d’resistancewas the gerrymandering of Ohio overseen by John Boehner. “The GOP controlled the redrawing of 132 state legislative and 16 congressional districts. Republican redistricting resulted in a net gain for the GOP state house caucus in 2012 and allowed a 12-4 Republican majority to return to the US House of Representatives — despite voters casting only 52 percent of their vote for Republican congressional candidates.” (There are worst cases: in North Carolina in 2012 Democrats won a majority of the congressional vote statewide but gained only four out of thirteen House seats.)

In the Midwest the 2010 Tea Party victories brought a new generation of feral Republicans to power, many of them groomed by far-right think tanks such as Indiana’s Policy Review Foundation (once headed by Mike Pence), Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute, and Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, all of them spoiling for a fight to the death with the region’s public-sector unions and progressive big-city governments. Coordinating through the State Policy Network (sixty-five conservative think tanks) and the American Legislative Exchange Council, they launched campaigns to destroy public-sector bargaining rights, defund unions through right-to-work laws, and privatize public education through vouchers.

They focused in other words on increasing their structural and legal advantages in ways that Democrats would find difficult, even impossible to roll back. Unions and students, of course, conducted an epic resistance in Wisconsin but were unable to recall Scott Walker, in large part because of the lackluster character of the Democratic candidate. In Ohio the unions were more successful and repealed right-to-work by referendum, but in Indiana, Michigan and West Virginia, Republican majorities rammed throughright-to-work and in Michigan, a Mackinac Center-inspired receivership for Detroit’s schools.

The Republican down-ticket in 2016, from Senate incumbents to state representatives and judges, ironically benefited greatly from Trump’s poor backing from the Kochs and other conservative mega-donors who switched funding from the presidential race to preserving control of Congress. For the first time super-PACs spent more on the Senate races than the presidential campaign. Trump, whom the New York Times estimated received $2 billion of free publicity from the media, was little affected, but the huge injection of dark money into state races was revolutionary.

More than three-quarters of Senate campaign funding came from out-of-state sourcesin 2016 and “just three groups, One Nation [Adelson], the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity, and the US Chamber of Commerce, account[ed] for 67 per cent in dark money spending.” The result, according to some political scientists, has been the “nationalization” of state politics. “As a result of the growing connection between presidential and state elections the once clear divide between state politics and national politics has largely disappeared in most of the country.” Thus for the first time in history, “there were no split votes in 2016 between Senate candidates and presidential contenders; the thirty-four states with Senate contests all voted the same party for both offices.”

It is no secret that the inadvertent ally of the Republicans in the Rust Belt has been Obama himself, whose lofty conception of the presidency does not include being the leader of the party, at least not in the old-fashioned, out-in-the-hustings style of an LBJ or even Clinton. In 2010, 2012, and again in 2014, Democratic candidates bitterly complained about their lack of support from the White House, especially in the upper South, Louisiana, and Texas.

Obama ended his presidency with the Democrats having lost nearly one thousand legislative seats across the country. Republicans legislatures are now targeting Missouri and Kentucky — possibly Ohio again, as well as Pennsylvania and New Hampshire — as the next right-to-work states. (In Missouri and New Hampshire right-to-work amendments recently had been passed by the legislatures but were vetoed by Democratic governors. Both states now have Republican governors.) You might call it the Southernization or Dixiefication of the Midwest.

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https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-is-no-blue-wall/

68-88 red wall 9=(tho not called that, but broke by dems)

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Nowadays, of course, it’s become common to hear talk about the “blue wall” — the set of 18 states that, along with the District of Columbia, have voted for the Democrat in each of the most recent six presidential elections, from 1992 through 2012. Together, they represent 242 electoral votes. Many pundits, ignoring the lessons of history, claim the “blue wall” or some close variation of it puts the Democratic nominee (likely Hillary Clinton) at a substantial advantage for 2016.

The error that these commentators are making is in attributing the Democrats’ recent run of success to the Electoral College. In fact, the Electoral College has been a minor factor, if it’s helped Democrats at all, and one probably best ignored until the late stages of a close presidential race.

But wait. Wasn’t Barack Obama’s margin in the Electoral College in 2012 — 332 electoral votes, to Mitt Romney’s 206 — awfully impressive given that he won the popular vote by only a few percentage points?

Actually, it was pretty much par for the course. The nature of the Electoral College is to accentuate small margins in the popular vote; Obama’s electoral vote tallies have been fine, but historically ordinary.

In the chart below, I’ve plotted the past century’s worth of presidential elections (from 1916 to 2012). The horizontal axis shows the Democrat’s margin of victory or defeat in the popular vote and the vertical axis how many electoral votes he received. (Totals are prorated to 538

...

Hey, look:I can get carried away, too.

Although if you read the post I linked to, note that I wrote it at a time when it looked like the “gap” between the popular vote and Electoral College result was wider than it turned out to be. Obama’s popular vote margin — only listed at 2.5 percentage points two days after the election — rose to 3.9 percent once additional votes were counted, especially from West Coast states.

" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 143, 213); text-decoration-line: none; position: relative;">⁶ If the 2016 election turns out to be close, we’ll be sweating the small stuff by October and November. The difference between a 50 percent and a 55 percent chance of victory for Clinton or Marco Rubio or whomever because of Electoral College dynamics will seem like a pretty big deal.

But for now? The Electoral College just isn’t worth worrying about much. If you see analysts talking about the “blue wall,” all they’re really saying is that Democrats have won a bunch of presidential elections lately — an obvious fact that probably doesn’t have much predictive power for what will happen this time around.

I’m not saying Clinton is doomed. Rather, I think the “fundamentals” point toward her chances being about 50-50, and I wouldn’t argue vigorously if you claimed the chances were more like 60-40 in one or the other direction. But Clinton is no sort of lock, and if she loses the popular vote by even a few percentage points, the “blue wall” will seem as archaic as talk of a permanent Republican majority.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/michigan-adopts-alec-model-diminishing-democracy/

john nichols 2016?

Michigan legislators did not write the so-called “right to work” legislation that they have [enacted in a mad rush of anti-democratic excess](http://www.freep.com/article/20121211/NEWS06/121211052/Snyder-makes-Michigan-24th-right-work-state-he-says-he-s-signed-bills?odyssey=mod|defcon|text|FRONTPAGE).

They simply did as they were told.

The ideas, the outlines and the words themselves came from the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-wing “bill mill” that produces “model legislation” at the behest of Koch Industries, Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, ExxonMobil and the corporate cabal that is always looking to “buy” states.

As the Center for Media and Democracy’s “ALEC Exposed” project revealed (in conjunction with The Nation), ALEC has developed binders full of “model legislation” that assaults the rights of working people, consumers and communities.

ALEC’s package of “model legislation” includes numerous bills and resolutions that, by any reasonable measure, would be referred to as “no rights at work” schemes.

Those measures formed the basis forHB 4003, the Michigan “Right-to-Work Act” that has provoked mass demonstrations in Lansing and other Michigan communities.

Section after section, line after line, of the Michigan legislation mirrors the ALEC model legislation, as revealed by the “ALEC Exposed” project. “The legislation is straight out of the Koch-funded ALEC playbook,” explains Brendan Fischer, the staff counsel with the Center for Media and Democracy. At some points, the Michigan lawmakers shifted words, from “resign or refrain from…a labor organization” in the ALEC model legislation to “refrain or resign from…a labor organization” in one of the two Michigan bills.

At other points, the Michigan Republicans simply lifted whole sections verbatim, outlining how workers who get the advantage of union representation will not have “to pay any dues, fees, assessments or other charges, of any kind or amount” to a labor organization.

The willingness of legislators in Michigan and, it should be noted, other states to simply take marching orders from ALEC is troubling enough.

But even more troubling is the reason why corporations and politicians in states where the middle class was forged by organized labor agree on the “need” to advance anti-labor legislation.

This is not about economic development, growth or job creation. And it is certainly not about “freedom,” as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder claims.

This is about warping democracy so that corporations have a consistent upper hand, with the result being that those politicians who are willing to do the bidding of corporations and wealthy donors are more likely to prevail. In this sense, the best way to understand the recent rush to enact anti-labor legislation is as part of the same initiative that has produced restrictive Voter ID laws, schemes to limit early voting and proposals to eliminate same-day registration.

What distinguishes the anti-labor initiatives is that they do not explicitly seek to make voting more difficult. They seek to make it harder for groups that seek high turnout to get voters motivated, to get voters organized and to get them to the polls.

Ultimately, however, the end result of the assault on labor rights is the same as a direct assault on voting rights: a diminished democracy.

Democracy is, of course, about more than elections. And that’s where the anti-union push becomes even more significant. It seeks to narrow the discourse by weakening groups that offer an alternative to a Wall Street–dictated future for communities, states and the nation.

Attacks on labor are nothing new. Michigan is not the first state to enact a “right to work” law—the most draconian of anti-labor initiatives. It is the twenty-fourth. Southern states enacted their laws restricting labor organizing and political engagement decades ago, at a time when legislators and governors in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina and other bastions of segregation feared that integrated unions would unite white workers and African-American workers on the side of social improvement. That created barriers to the labor movement in the South at a time when it was still growing in much of the country.

Now, however, the anti-labor push has come north.

There is a reason ALEC and its corporate sponsors want to undermine unions.

In states such as Michigan, and Wisconsin, and Ohio, and Indiana, organized labor provides a political counterbalance to corporations. Unions cannot and do not match the spending on elections by wealthy donors and corporations. But the willingness of unions to commit financial and human resources to political fights makes a huge difference at election time in states where the labor movement has a significant presence. The 2012 election results—particularly the big wins for President Obama and Democratic Senate candidates in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—point to the connection.

This is not, however, simply about Democrats or Republicans, liberals or conservatives. Among the [Michigan legislators who opposed](http://www.freep.com/article/20121211/NEWS06/121211052/Snyder-makes-Michigan-24th-right-work-state-he-says-he-s-signed-bills?odyssey=mod|defcon|text|FRONTPAGE) the latest attack on union rights were six state House Republicans. Unions have long traditions of aiding Republicans, and even social conservatives, who have proven to be allies of working people.Prominent conservatives once opposed “right to work” laws, asRonald Reagan did at the start of his political career, writing as he launched his 1966 California gubernatorial race: “I also was a leader of our [Screen Actors] Guild in the fight in 1958 against the [California] right-to-work bill. I am still opposed to right-to-work.”

Now, for the most part, conservatives have cast their lot with corporations. And the demand of corporations, particularly those engaged in the ALEC project, is that politicians who want to earn the favor of corporations and wealthy donors such as Charles and David Koch or Michigan right-wingers Dick and Betsy DeVos must advance anti-labor legislation.

Anti-labor laws in Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan—and the attempts to do so in states such as New Hampshire—have been advanced by political figures with ALEC ties. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is an ALEC alumnus, as is Ohio Governor John Kasich. Among the key sponsors of the Michigan law that Governor Snyder signed today was state Senator Dave Hildenbrand, a Republican who famously paid his ALEC dues with taxpayer funds.

Those political figures are determined to limit the ability of unions to engage in political activity on behalf or working families, communities, public services and public education.

Why? By making it harder for unions to organize and to represent workers, “right to work” laws make it easier for corporations to get their political allies elected. The corporations and the legislators come together in the American Legislative Exchange Council. They produce “model legislation” to advance their project. And that project is about rewriting the rules so that the corporations win.

“What they’re doing is basically, betraying democracy,” says Teamsters president James Hoffa, who promises a great struggle to restore labor rights in Michigan.

Hoffa’s point is well taken.

Michigan politicians have betrayed democracy.

And democracy betrayed is democracy denied.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/michigan-adopts-alec-model-diminishing-democracy/

john nichols 2016?

They simply did as they were told.

ALEC’s package of “model legislation” includes numerous bills and resolutions that, by any reasonable measure, would be referred to as “no rights at work” schemes.

Those measures formed the basis forHB 4003, the Michigan “Right-to-Work Act” that has provoked mass demonstrations in Lansing and other Michigan communities.

The willingness of legislators in Michigan and, it should be noted, other states to simply take marching orders from ALEC is troubling enough.

But even more troubling is the reason why corporations and politicians in states where the middle class was forged by organized labor agree on the “need” to advance anti-labor legislation.

This is not about economic development, growth or job creation. And it is certainly not about “freedom,” as Michigan Governor Rick Snyder claims.

Ultimately, however, the end result of the assault on labor rights is the same as a direct assault on voting rights: a diminished democracy.

Now, however, the anti-labor push has come north.

There is a reason ALEC and its corporate sponsors want to undermine unions.

Those political figures are determined to limit the ability of unions to engage in political activity on behalf or working families, communities, public services and public education.

“What they’re doing is basically, betraying democracy,” says Teamsters president James Hoffa, who promises a great struggle to restore labor rights in Michigan.

Hoffa’s point is well taken.

Michigan politicians have betrayed democracy.

And democracy betrayed is democracy denied.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine%27s_2nd_congressional_district

Maine's 2nd congressional district is a congressional district in the U.S. state of Maine. Covering 27,326 square miles (70,770 km²⁾, it comprises nearly 80% of the state's total land area. It is the largest district east of the Mississippi River and the 24th-largest overall. It is the second-most rural district in the United States, with 72.11% of its population in rural areas, behind only Kentucky's 5th congressional district.^[2]

The district comprises most of the land area north of the Portland and Augusta metropolitan areas. It includes the cities of Bangor, Lewiston, Auburnand Presque Isle. It included the city of Waterville until 2011, when Maine's Congressional redistricting process following the 2010 US Census led to a shift of district boundaries within Kennebec County.

The district is currently represented by Republican Bruce Poliquin.

[hide]

Election results from presidential races

Whoever wins a presidential race in Maine's second congressional district gets one electoral vote. Since establishing the district plan for electoral college selection in 1969, Maine's second congressional district has voted the same way as the entire state of Maine for every election except 2016.

Year	Results
1992	Clinton 38 – 33% (vs. Ind. Perot)
1996	Clinton 51 – 30%
2000	Gore 47 – 46%
2004	Kerry 52 – 46%
2008	Obama 55 – 43%
2012	Obama 52 – 44%
2016^[3]	Trump 51 – 41%

History

See District of Maine

When Maine became a state in 1820, it had seven congressional districts credited to it. Prior to that it was part of Massachusetts, which had 20 districts after the 1810 U.S. Census. Since Maine became a state, all but two districts have been reallocated.

Composition

The boundaries of the District are open for reconsideration in light of population shifts revealed by the decennial US Census. Until 2011, Maine's constitution provided for the state to reapportion the Congressional districts based on census data every ten years beginning in 1983, which would have meant that the state was next due to consider redistricting in 2013. However, a federal lawsuit filed in March 2011 led to a requirement that Maine speed up its redistricting process.^[4] Maine state legislators approved new boundaries on September 27, 2011.^[5]

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sorta whimsical, see WISC 2

prompted a bit by cronon sussing out alec

But deeper than that: WICheddar Cheese mafia: Eric O'Keefe (Wisconsin, Club for Growth) ran the Sam Adams Alliance that built the Tea party, despite longstanding a vigorous denials by Kochs). WII Reince Priebus and paul Ryan are old pals, and though trump attacked GOP leadership, they caved. Gov Scott Walker has been a major implementer of the Koch agenda, anti-union, anti-environment, privatization of all, including schools and prisons). The Kochs had to intervene massively to stop the recall, and it is still a mystery about why Walker abruptly bailed from 2016 race, though will probably involve the John Doe dark money; however, Kochs have been investing in WI supreme court for quite some time).

Walker is an ally of neighboring MI Gov Snyder,and have implemented similar programs. The ultimate fruit of free-marketeering is the lead poisoning of poor black kids, which will permanently lead to cognitive impairment. These two are part of the larger ALEC-Koch-alypse(Four Horsemen: privatization, financialization, militarization, and criminalization). They have funded quite a few midwestern governors, includingKasich and Pence.Some “failed up” and revolving door in Bush admin eg Homeland, butBrownbackwas perhaps most faithful implementer of Koch Libertarianism program and crashed his state (hired ALEC's Laffer to sell tax plan).

The 2016 United States presidential election in Michigan was won by Donald Trumpon November 8, 2016 with 47.50% of the total votes, over Hillary Clinton's 47.27%. All of Michigan's 16 Electoral Votes were assigned to Trump, contributing to his victory in the 2016 United States presidential election.

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unions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election_in_Wisconsin,_2016

It was corrected in the official vote totals. As it stands before the recount began, Trump was reported to have won Wisconsin by a narrow margin — 1,405,284 votes to Clinton's 1,382,536. Wisconsin was also the tipping point state of the 2016 election.

RepublicanDonald TrumpMike Pence1,405,28447.22%10

Democratic Hillary Clinton Tim Kaine 1,382,536 46.45% 0 electoral votes

Libertarian Gary Johnson William Weld106,6743.58%0

Green Jill Stein Ajamu Baraka31,0721.04%0

Constitution Darrell Castle Scott Bradley12,1620.41%0Independent (write-in votes)Evan McMullin Nathan Johnson11,8550.40%0Workers World Monica Moorehead Lamont Lilly1,7700.06%0Independent Rocky De La Fuente Michael Steinberg1,5020.05%0Others / Write-In Votes--23,2950.78%0Totals2,976,150100.00%10Voter turnout (Voting age population)Source: Wisconsin Elections Commission

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/donald-trump-will-be-president-thanks-to-80000-people-in-three-states

...Three-weeks-plus after Election Day, there are still more votes to count in California than were cast in each of nine states and D.C. Most of the votes that have been (slowly, laboriously) counted in the state have been votes for Hillary Clinton, giving her a 4.1 million-vote lead in that state that's powering her 2.5 million-vote lead nationally. It takes Donald Trump's margins in the seven states where he saw the biggest vote advantages to make up Clinton's lead in California alone. (All of these figures thanks to Cook Political's Dave Wasserman.)

But, of course, none of this matters. All that matters is that Trump got more electoral college votes, thanks to having won more states. In many cases, those wins were much more narrow than Clinton's, which also helps power the gap between the electoral vote and the popular one. Trump won 18 states by fewer than 250,000 votes; Clinton, 13.

The most important states, though, were Michigan10,704, Pennsylvania (46,765 )and Wisconsin (22,177). Trump won those states by 0.2, 0.7 and 0.8 percentage points, respectively — and by 10,704, 46,765 and 22,177 votes. Those three wins gave him 46 electoral votes; if Clinton had done one point better in each state, she'd have won the electoral vote, too.

...

blue wall

Working-class identity

Economic abandonment

What fairness requires

Alignment becomes division

How the ‘system’ plays

Not all class war

The Mythic Blue Wall

Contents

Election results from presidential races

History

Composition